August 31, 2010

I'm a shameless dork about a number of literary things, but perhaps the first of them were the Paris Review interviews. Plenty of other folks might have been doing more interesting things on their study breaks in my college library, but I wore a path in the linoleum between my desk and the shelf in the stacks where they kept all the old Writers at Work collections, and by the end of four years I had worked my way through all of them, from E.M. Forster through Rebecca West and S.J. Perelman and James Jones and Lillian Hellman and all those other mid-century giants canonized by the magazine's editors, and if I hadn't graduated I'd probably have started over at the beginning and gone through again.

Why are they special? Well, because they were first (author interviews were nowhere near as ubiquitous then as now), but, as the newish editor of the Paris Review, Lorin Stein, pointed out during his guest stint on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog last week, because they treat these interviews like no one else does. This isn't some guy (like me) calling up an author for 20 minutes and calling it a podcast. As the writers I've talked to who have worked on these have confirmed, they are a major, collaborative project:

In the first place, the method is slow. My interviewwith Jonathan Lethem took a couple of weeks, with reading assignmentsbefore each session. Joshua Pashman's interview with Norman Rush,coming out in the September issue, took three years, eight sessions,and 500 pages of transcript. (Later boiled down to 33 pages in print.)

In the second place, the interviews are collaborative. After ourinterns type up the transcripts, the interviewer and subject sit downand edit them"”together. Often they rewrite the questions and answerscompletely. When Frederick Seidel interviewed Robert Lowell, the tape recorder didn't work: Fred wrote up the whole thing from memory, then gave it to Lowell to revise.

When writers have total control, George realized, they feel safe. And when they feel safe they open up.

Stein's post is of course quite rah-rah for his own magazine, but I'd no doubt feel the same if I had been bequeathed a legacy like that. And as a dork, I loved the glimpse behind the curtain, including a preview of the interviews in the pipeline for coming issues, starting with Norman Rush and Michel Houellebecq in the September issue, and after that "Dave Eggers, Ann Beattie, Samuel Delaney, Louise Erdrich"”and, yes, Jonathan Franzen." And, perhaps best news of all, they are in the process of putting the full archive online and searchable. You can also find some of them in the newly curated collections Picador has put out in the past few years: volumes I, II, III, and IV. --Tom

P.S. Coates, one of my favorite bloggers, had a couple of editors as guests while he was off writing in the woods this past month, and I had meant to point to them earlier, since it's relatively rare that book editors step out from behind their desks to speak for themselves. Along with Stein's posts, I liked what Chris Jackson, who edited Coates's Beautiful Struggle at Spiegel & Grau as well as folks like Victor LaValle and Matt Taibbi, had to say about his approach:

Part of the fun of being an editor is the occasional fantasy thatyou're calling together a league of literary superheroes to take on theforces of evil in the world. Put your art to work, I say. I've alwaysbeen drawn to stylistic outliers, polemicists, and revisionists--I'm afirm believer that the greatest need in our age is for writers to movereaders from whatever comfortable positioned they've fallen into. I'ma fan of vulgarity. In part its a function of my upbringing: growingup in Harlem in the 70s and 80s taught me a lot about the irrepressiblepower of a true thing told in the most resonant possible language.

Jackson and Stein also each had responses to the Weiner/Picoult/Franzen hoo-ha that managed to get them heaped with more hoo-ha, about which more later.

The Jedi Path was conceived as a textbook that was carried by young Initiates and Padawans to guide their instruction in the Jedi Temple. It's supposed to look like an in-universe artifact that fell through a rabbit hole from the galaxy far, far away. In fact, this copy is ostensibly the last one in existence following Order 66 and the destruction of the Jedi Temple.

The "vault edition" is packaged by becker&mayer! and sold through Amazon. It features a mechanized metallic case and removable items including a letter tracing the book's history, a severed Padawan braid, a metal Jedi Credit medallion, a Jedi starfighter patch, a burned poster of the Jedi Code, a map of the Jedi Temple, a lightsaber sketch on the back of a Dex's Diner napkin, and a note concerning some missing pages apparently torn from the book.

The book itself contains the wisdom of eight revered Jedi who put their thoughts to paper approximately 1,000 years before the events of the movies. This particular copy was printed approx a century before the movies, falling into the consecutive hands of Yoda, Thame Cerulian, Count Dooku, Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka Tano, Darth Sidious, and Luke Skywalker. All of the owners left handwritten comments in the margins so they could complain, educate, mope, or gloat.

And here are a just few of Daniel Wallace's photos from Comic-Con (click on the images to get a better look):

New York Times (we covered the Sunday Franzen cover review ahead of time last week):

Kakutani on The Thousand by Kevin Guilfoile: "It's hard to imagine that a novelist could lift such elements fromseveral of the best-known best sellers of recent years and turn theminto something original and gripping, but that's exactly what Mr.Guilfoile has done in 'The Thousand.' Though there's some ridiculousmumbo jumbo about the secret society at the heart of the novel, thoughsome of the complicated plot points end up not making a whole lot ofsense, the book is jet-fueled by its author's unerring sense ofcharacter and his nimble, fleet-footed prose."

Jim Krusoe on Meeks by Julia Holmes: "'Meeks' is a wild, woolly, sly, gentle and wry first novel by JuliaHolmes, as well as the name of one of the book's two main characters, apark bum with delusions of grandeur.... 'Meeks' isn't one of those books a reader snuggles next to for apleasant trip to the mostly familiar. It's more like having a dreamwhere everything starts off well enough, and then, without quiteknowing why, you're being chased. It's a book whose singular visionkeeps returning to me at odd moments, one of the most original andreadable novels that's come my way in a long time."

Maslin on True Prep by Lisa Birnbach: "'True Prep: It's a Whole New Old World,' [is] a surprisingly worthwhilesequel to the now-creaky 'Handbook.' This new compendium moves beyondschool days to address matters newly relevant for the core readership:how to remarry, how to dress for a funeral and how to deal with thecollateral damage caused by decades' worth of the party-hearty behaviordescribed in the first book."

Washington Post:

Carolyn See on Growing Up Jung by Micah Toub: "There's nothing more endearing than a family memoir in which the authoris actually fond of his family. It's rare; it's close to miraculous. Ifa person wants to write about his youth and his parents, it's usuallybecause he has scores to settle. Affection turns the whole thing into amiracle.... I hated to see this book end. I loved every person in it, from thewistful dad with his 'fluffy-edged' voice, to Toub's kind and darlingmom, his tolerant and loving ex-wife, even that volcanic teenagedsister, who refused to tell stories about the ceiling. 'Growing Up Jung' is a gem."

Jess Walter on Skippy Dies by Paul Murray: "If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go soundsaudacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pullsoff in this hilarious, moving and wise book. Recently named to the Man Booker Prize long list, 'Skippy Dies' is an epic crafted around, of all things, apack of 14-year-old boys. It's the 'Moby-Dick' of Irish prep schools."

Sy Montgomery on The Tiger by John Vaillant: "To those of us who love the embattled cat, 'The Tiger' offers the emotional satisfaction of Quentin Tarantino's film 'Kill Bill'-- with the tiger in the role of Uma Thurman's vengeful bride. But thecharacters in this book, both human and tigrine, are more nuanced.... Vaillant's book teaches a lesson that humankind desperately needs toremember: When you murder a tiger, you not only kill a strong andbeautiful beast, you extinguish a passionate soul."

And then there's Ron Charles, who has indeed turned his mixed review of Franzen's Freedom (which I linked to last week) into his second video book review. In this case, thanks to some funny homemade effects and a camera-ready subject, I think video beats print:

Los Angeles Times:

Carolyn Kellogg on Three Delays by Charlie Smith: "Billy and Alice are a tripped-out Scott and Zelda, a Jane Austen romance via Hunter S. Thompson, a Romeo and Juliet on the burned-out edge of the baby boom.... This fictional relationship, like those in real life, ultimatelyexcludes those not a part of it. There is no effort to seduce thereader; Billy tells us how deeply he knows Alice, but we can't go therewith him. Coupled with the unimportant plot and unclear chronology, therefrain of this relationship fails, at times, to carry the book'sweight. Luckily, there is Charlie Smith's engulfing prose, full of surprises and possibility, to lift it up. Which it does."

Marion Winik on Guilfoile's The Thousand: "If you like Scott Turow, Stan Lee, Dan Brown, or Michael Crichton,then you are in the target audience for Kevin Guilfoile's novel 'TheThousand.' Unfortunately, like smoked duck ravioli withwasabi-tomatillo sauce, Guilfoile has fallen under the sway of oneinfluence too many."

The Globe & Mail:

J.C. Sutcliffe on Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes (UK only): "The characters are not complex, and indeed are often utterly ridiculousand unpleasant, but Rhodes is fond of his creations and never makes funat their expense. His great strength is finding someone's heart,parsing the nuances of its language, and then translating it for theskeptical reader, even in the unlikeliest places. Part fairy tale andpart gruesome whimsy, the delightful inventiveness of Little Hands Clapping will intrigue and entertain from first page to last."

Spider Robinson on Packing for Mars by Mary Roach: "I finished the book in a single day, and although I was interruptedmany times, I never needed a bookmark: Whenever I picked it back up, Ijust looked for the place where my underlining stopped. Roach educatedme, entertained me, cracked me up repeatedly, forced me to rethink somelong-held beliefs and, even more unexpected "“ I'd have said it wasimpossible "“ several times she totally grossed me out. But while she appreciates a really outrageous anecdote, she has an even greater fondness for the truth."

The Guardian:

Stuart Jeffries on Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz: "In this lovely book about human mistakes the sickeningly young,forbiddingly clever and vexingly wise American journalist KathrynSchulz ... argues passionately for the value of error. The experience ofbeing wrong, she argues, helps to make us better people, with richerlives.... What is most cherishable about this bumper book of other people'sbooboos is its insistence that to experience error is, at its best, tofind adventure "“ and even contentment.... The book, if too long, is for the most part delightfully written. Itreminds me of what we want clever Americans to be: positive, without araincloud for a heart, and yet with the wit to make that optimismcompelling."

James Lasdun on Nourishment by Gerald Woodward: "If Gerard Woodward seems something of an outsider in the Englishliterary scene, it is perhaps because of the very Englishness of hiswork. It would be hard to think of a writer less overtly influenced by fiction from elsewhere.... English embarrassment and the equally English love of provoking itthrough farcical surprise or scatological shock are a large part of hisstock in trade. At the same time, with his gift for pushing situationsto their furthest possible extreme, he can strike notes of piercinganguish and joy. His sensibility seems to hover somewhere betweenStanley Spencer and Benny Hill."

The New Yorker:

Jill Lepore on The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson: "Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavalsof the past century"”a phenomenon whose dimensions and significance haveeluded many a scholar"”and told it through the lives of three people noone has ever heard of. Narrative nonfiction is risky; it has to begrabby, telling, and true. To bear analytical weight, it has to bealmost frighteningly shrewd.... This is narrative nonfiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist. Thestory exposes; the story moves; the story ends. What Wilkerson urges,finally, isn't argument at all; it's compassion. Hush, and listen."

James Wood on 03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat (subscribers only): "Nothing happens in '03.' The narrator has his thoughts, and then the book ends: boy and girl are still at the bus stop, as they were at the start. '03' has the afternoon listless of adolescence. It is a risky and ambitious book, though it does not seem 'experimental' as such, in part because it is so grounded in the real, in the boredom and self-aggrandizement of being a teen-ager."

August 30, 2010

An Undefined Future for the O.E.D.: Oxford University Press clarified today that a decision on whether the Oxford English Dictionary's third edition will be made available in physical form or go completely digital would be premature: "It is likely to be more than a decade before the full edition is published, and a decision on format will be taken at that point."

Zimmy's Mark on History (and Historians): Purists wary of a historian's take on Dylan might reconsider given Sean Wilentz's visceral connection to his subject. In a review of Bob Dylan in America, New York Magazine quotes Wilentz as creditingDylan with his own historical epiphany:

"He discovered something in me and I heard it," he says, "which is that you can see the past in the present. To me, the collapsing of it is the beginnings of historical consciousness. I can feel it, taste it, and smell it, and so can he."

First-time novelist Darin Bradley, guestblogging on Omnivoracious this week, has taught courses on writing and literature at the University of North Texas, Furman University, and East Tennessee State University. His short fiction, poetry, and critical nonfiction have appeared in a variety of journals, and he served as founding fiction editor of the experimental e-zine, Farrago's Wainscot.

Noise takes as its premise that, in the aftermath of the switch from analog to digital TV, an anarchic movement known as Salvage hijacks the unused airwaves. Mixed in with the static's random noise are dire warnings of the imminent economic, political, and social collapse of civilization"”and cold-blooded lessons on how to survive the fall and prosper in the harsh new order that will inevitably arise from the ashes of the old. Critically acclaimed writer Paul Jessup has called Noise "Little Brother meets Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness meets Mad Max and the Road Warrior meets Letham."

Today, Bradley talks apocalypse, returning on Wednesday and Thursday with new posts...

We all think about the end of the world. Heck, we've been thinking about it for thousands of years. Many of our greatest, most beautiful religious and philosophic traditions are apocalyptic or "eschatological." As soon as we were cogent enough, along the evolutionary path, to realize we were here, we started to wonder about just how permanent "here" is.

These days, though, the "end of the world" has a slightly different feeling. Sure, some of us still worry about global nuclear annihilation, but that particular scenario lost most of its popularity in the '80s. These days, we're pretty concerned about the effects of global warming, and that may be even more terrifying because it'll be a gradual, painful, relentless End of the World. These days, we seem to wrestle-- artistically, at least--with defining "world." Do we mean all of it? A continent at a time? Your neighborhood? Your house? Apocalypse and "collapse" have become nearly synonymous.

So, we all think about it--some of us, perhaps, more than we should. I'm one of those. My name is Darin Bradley and this week Ballantine Spectra is releasing my first novel, Noise. Noise is about--you guessed it--The End of the World. Well, the collapse of it, anyway.

Let's just use "apocalypse" freely--it'll make the conversation smoother. Apocalypse stories are a dime a dozen. They're everywhere: television, the big screen, video games, role-playing games--you name it. They're fun, but they often rehash the same story arc: things are bad, everything falls apart, the future tells us how to celebrate/take care of what we have now. Presto! Easy story. If you're curious why the formula works, or how we may have come by it, you might check out my blog series "The Beginning of the End," over at Random House's Suvudu blog (particularly Episode 4, "Groups".

But here and now, why should Noise stand out? Why did I write it in the first place, if there is already a glut of apocalyptic fiction? Why should you read it?

Noise sprang from a few years of apocalyptic consideration. While I was finishing up some degrees in graduate school, I started wondering how literary theory, science fiction, and The End of the World all fit together. The end result, aside from the novel itself, was an apocalypse story with instructions for how to survive. Again, big deal, right? We've seen instructions like these before. Noise, though, concentrates on what a society is, what its (fictional) nature is, and how you build one. In order to understand how terrible, fascist, evil nations have come to power, Noise takes a look at their "good" beginnings, and it gives you the instructions for how to build your own post-apocalyptic nation-state.

The novel wants to know what kind of nation you'd build. Would it be a "good" one?

August 29, 2010

The "Green Book" inspires a kids' book. The New York Times has the story on how the "Green Book"--or, more formally, "The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide"--will feature in a new kids' book. ("It tells the story of a girl from Chicago in the 1950s and what she learns as she and her parents, driving their brand-new car to visit her grandmother in rural Alabama, finally luck into a copy of Victor Green's guide.")

Finnikin of the Rock review. Sure, Finnikin of the Rock is officially YA, not strictly kid-lit, but Liz B. at Tea Cozy loved it so much that she stayed up until 4am reading it: "I love this book so much that I am now torn between two book boyfriends (Eugenides and Finnikin), feeling like a fool, loving them both is breaking all the rules."

Diary of a Wimpy Kid-style "hybrids." The Seattle Times talks about a new trend, the rise of chapter books "with a blend of text and illustrations." Among these Diary of a Wimpy Kid-style hybrids are Lincoln Peirce's Big Nate books and Jon Scieszka's Spaceheadz.

Talking to the vampire expert. School Library Journal just did an interview with Donna Rosenblum, their "expert reviewer" of vampire books, "to find out what else--besides Twilight--is hot and why kids think vampire books are so banging." She also discusses typical onset age for vampirophilia ("Around 10 or 11. Sixth grade-ish.") and what books make for a good introduction to the genre (Bunnicula tops the list for fourth- and fifth-graders).

August 27, 2010

When I interviewed creator, writer, and artist Mike Mignola at the 2009 Emerald City ComiCon, I had to smile and nod when he mentioned his side project, The Amazing Screw-On Head, because I knew next to nothing about it. Afterward, I decided to do some digging, and while I could not find reasonably priced, available copy, I did uncover a few interesting tidbits. In 2002, Mignola wrote and illustrated The Amazing Screw-On Head as a one-shot comic, and it went on to win the Eisner Award for Best Humor Publication. A few years later, Mignola developed the comic into a pilot for the SciFi (now, cringingly, "SyFy") Channel. (Unfortunately, it was not picked up for further episodes.) Not too shabby for a comic with a quirky title; if only I could read it.

Cut to this September, when Dark Horse Comics will release a special hardcover edition of The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects, including three never-before-published short stories and "The Magician and the Snake," another Eisner Award-winning tale, all written and drawn by Mignola.

The hardcover is a slim one--104 pages--and the titular story is only about a quarter of the page count, but it packs in the signature Mignola creepiness and humor as if it were all too aware of its abbreviated length. After finally devouring the contents, I'm at a loss at how to describe it without doing the absurdity a disservice. To begin with, President Lincoln unblinkingly calls upon "Screw-On Head," who, as his name suggests, is a detached head with a threaded neck that allows him to be twisted into various vessels/bodies to thwart evil. He is aided by Mister Groin, who, as his name does not suggest, is a well-dressed and soft-spoken partner of Head's. Together, they are assigned with stopping the nefarious plan of Emperor Zombie and a giant catfish-headed dragon. It's as crazy as it sounds. Coupled with the deadpan storytelling, the outlandish visuals (aided in no small part by colorist Dave Stewart) and off-kilter chain of events make this a sure-to-please read for fans of the goofier side of the Hellboy auteur.

"The Amazing Screw-On Head started out as an idea for a toy. It wasn't a serious idea, just a thought--a robot head, threaded like a light bulb, that you could screw into different robot bodies. I like that. I still want that toy"¦I created a comic that was pretty much just for me," writes Mignola in the supplemental section of the hardcover. He also reveals that two of the stories, "The Prisoner of Mars" and "The Witch and Her Soul," were written specifically for this collection. The short stories veer in tone from folktale to Sci-Fi hysteria, and if they feel a bit slight, it's only because it's so easy to want more when Mignola both writes and illustrates his work. New artwork from Mignola has been sparse the past few years, making this collection a must-read--and it's full of alien jellyfish, low-tech machines, vampire bats, and ominous statues.

In November, a new Hellboy collection, Masks and Monsters, arrives (this is the third Hellboy collection this year after The Wild Hunt andThe Crooked Man and Others), along withB.P.R.D. Vol. 14: King of Fear, which has the tough task of following Vol. 13, also released in 2010 and one of the better B.P.R.D. trades out there. While I'm at it, I might as well mention Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels, which centers around a very peripheral character from the usual books and is impossibly fun. As the Hellboy universe continues to sprawl and branch out, a book like The Amazing Screw-On Head serves as a palate cleanser. Think of it as a brief but welcome diversion for readers already steeped in the Hellboy mythos.

Like many publications connected to book culture, Publishers Weekly has been changing in response to a changing landscape. A little over three years ago, they turned over the science fiction/fantasy.horror reviews editor job to Rose Fox, and launched PW's Genreville, where Fox regularly blogs about industry news along with her partner Josh Jasper. Fox's energy and progressive approach have given the SF/F/H section of the magazine a definite boost, and provided genre fiction with a new public forum.

Fox comes from a literary family. Her father, Charles Platt, is a British writer associated with the New Wave science fiction writers of the 1960s who has since become a naturalized U.S. citizen. His cult novel The Gas (written for the infamous Paris publisher Olympia Press) deliberately pushed buttons and boundaries, and William Gibson endorsed his The Silicon Man as a "wholly new and very refreshing way" of exploring cyberspace.Platt has also been widely praised for his journalism, especially his work for Wired and Make magazines.

Her mother, Nancy Weber, is best known for her memoir The Life Swap, in which she recounts her efforts to exchange lives with another woman in the 1970s. Her fiction credits include horror (The Playgroup), category romance (eight for Berkley Jove's To Have and to Hold and Second Chance at Love lines), mainstream fiction (Brokenhearted), and young adult (Double Solitaire) titles. A professional chef as well as an author, she currently focuses on essays, travel and culinary journalism, and other nonfiction.

I interviewed Fox via email recently--about her family and her work at Publishers Weekly.

Amazon.com: Would you describe your childhood as being "literary" in the sense of being surrounded by books, writers, the whole culture?

Rose Fox: Oh, absolutely. Both my parents are writers. My aunt and uncle are writers. My mother's father and grandfather ran a printing company. I have ink in my veins. I grew up surrounded by books and words (my mother is a word game fiend) and writers of all stripes.

Amazon.com: Do you remember if there was a time when it first dawned on you that your father and mother were published writers? Growing up, what did that mean to you?

Rose Fox: It's just something I always knew. I should mention here that my parents split up when I was quite young, and I lived with my mother and only visited my father once a week or so. While my mother was raising me on her own, she supported us with her writing, so a typical day would be her in one room with the typewriter and me in the other room with the babysitter. I didn't see my father at work as much, but I probably assumed he was a writer before I actually knew it, because writing is just what parents do!

After my mother remarried, my stepfather brought in most of the family's money, and my mother worked from home in an open- sided "office" that allowed me and my brother to terrorize her and drag her away from her work pretty frequently, so while she spoke often of writing as art and fun, I never really got the sense from her of writing as a business. My father was the one who occasionally talked about making extra money by writing for men's magazines (under a pseudonym because he didn't want any of my male classmates finding the articles and teasing me about it, which I thought was extremely thoughtful of him) and about building a book the way you build a table. It took me a long time to appreciate his perspective, but now I think I agree with it more in some ways.

He also introduced me to fannish drama, of course; I think I helped him assemble membership packets for Victims of Ellison, and when a boyfriend invited me to Lunacon, my father mentioned being banned from there for life. I met Teresa Nielsen Hayden when I was 17, and she exclaimed "You look so much like your father!". No one had ever said that to me before! It really brought home that there was a whole world of people out there who all knew my father, many of whom didn't like him very much, and they were all involved in publishing the books I loved to read. I decided then that I would never ever use my parents' connections to get ahead in the publishing world (a ridiculously idealistic attitude that I later gave up entirely) and hoped that no one would hold my father's notoriety against me (and indeed, no one ever has).

Amazon.com: Did you read much of your father's work prior to publication?

Rose Fox: No, not that I recall. I only saw it in finished form. I don't remember it ever occurring to me to ask whether I could see his drafts, even though I was my mother's first-pass reader from the age of nine or so. It just didn't come up.

Amazon.com: Did you write as a child, and did your parents read it?

Rose Fox: I did indeed write as a child, very badly. When I was in third grade, each of us got a small notebook in which we were supposed to handwrite a novel. I got about 100 pages in (small notebook pages, mind you, but I still thought this was quite an accomplishment). It was about a ballerina and she got a bad headache and looked up headaches in some big reference book of symptoms and realized it meant she was deathly ill. I think I stopped because I got bored and didn't know how to end it. It was terrible. I really doubt my father read it. My mother probably laminated each page and framed them or something.

In my teens, I wrote a bunch of little fantasy stories and angsty poems. I don't remember whether I ever showed them to my father, though. At that point our relationship was mostly based on playing video games together and talking about books we'd read recently and people we knew from the local BBS; asking him to critique my writing would have invoked a level of intimacy that I suspect neither of us would have been very comfortable with.

I showed a couple of early pieces to my mother and she critiqued them, which was a little awkward for me as her daughter but also probably very good for me as a writer. I recently went through a bunch of old letters and found a card from her congratulating me on making successful revisions that she felt made a story flow much more smoothly. Which story and what I did to it, however, are lost to the mists of time.

Amazon.com: Did you always know you wanted to be involved with publishing/writing in some way?

Rose Fox: Yes and no. Here is half of the story: Everyone always assumed I was going to write fiction. I liked writing, but I liked math and computers a lot more; when I took the SAT, my math score was higher than my writing score. I majored in math and computer science in college, and then dropped out and worked in a computer store. Then I moved to California, took some community college classes in architecture, and then dropped out to work in customer service at a dotcom. I moved back to New York in 2005 and ended up being a receptionist at a nonprofit. After a year of that, I decided that I wanted to be a writer and editor, and then I made what looks like this crazy prodigal leap into an editorial assistant job at a medical journal and a freelance writing career that eventually landed me at PW.

Here is the other half of the story: Everyone always assumed I was going to write fiction. I started editing my mother's manuscripts when I was nine years old. I wrote and edited for my high school's fantasy and science fiction magazine and did an internship at Tor Books my senior year (or most of one, before they fired me for getting on the wrong side of a short- tempered editor). By my second semester in college I was a copyeditor on the student newspaper; by the third semester I was the copy chief.

I was also spending countless hours online, writing endlessly on BBS forums and Usenet. I dropped out of college and started writing endlessly on LiveJournal as well. I submitted a sample review to PW and they liked it; after my first jobs in California evaporated, I started reviewing three books a week. I began reading the LJs and other blogs of genre writers so I could write better reviews. When I started working for the dotcom, I quickly took charge of developing documentation and editing customer biographies, and typed so much that I developed tendinitis in both arms. I moved back to New York and began editing a section of a local e-zine from my reception desk at the nonprofit.

In other words, when I decided to pursue writing and editing for a living, it was with an air of resigned acceptance. I had spent most of my life technically doing other things, often trying to get away from the idea of being destined to follow in my parents' footsteps, and being convinced that being fired from Tor meant that I Would Never Work In That Town Again. (Had I successfully completed that internship, I think I would very likely have managed to survive four years of college and followed a much more conventional career path into book editing.) Nonetheless, the words had followed me. Wherever I was, I ended up writing and editing. So in 2006, I gave in. It still amazes me how brilliantly everything fell into place once I made that decision, but there's no question that I spent most of my life laying the groundwork for it, almost in spite of myself.

Amazon.com: How many books come in a day or a week at PW?

Rose Fox: We get hundreds of galleys a day, easily; not sure how many hundreds, but definitely hundreds. See the cart in this photo, in front of the shelves?

It's full of galleys. And the cart to the right of it is full of padded mailers. Every day there are enormous piles of packages on that counter. It takes hours just to open them, and when we moved offices recently, the first order of business was figuring out how to get enough recycling and trash bins for all the packaging material we couldn't reuse. (I have a burning hatred for Tyvek mailers now. The cardboard envelopes stuffed with paper flakes are also awful, because you can't reuse them and one false move with the box cutter means that everything's coated in grey dust, but at least those can be recycled.)

Keep in mind that we request two copies of each review book--one to send to the reviewer, the other to keep in-house for fact-checking--so that obviously increases the volume.

Amazon.com: How easy is it to decide what to review and what to discard?

Rose Fox: The only difficult ones are the ones from publishers I don't recognize. Otherwise it's a very straightforward process.

Amazon.com: Do you have any personal favorite blog posts, books reviewed, or PW features from the past year or so?

Rose Fox: I loved Naomi Novik's "Why I Write" piece in the April 2010 SF/F issue, and Mikki Kendall's profile of Nnedi Okorafor. JoSelle Vanderhooft also did a really nice write-up on Subterranean Press for our horror issue in July.

My favorite blog post will always be this one for the 182 comments, about 170 of which were from well-meaning fans of a certain author who happened to post the link to his Facebook fan page.

For my favorite books that we've reviewed, you'll have to wait for our 2010 best books feature!

Amazon.com: What's the most fulfilling thing about being a reviews editor at PW?

Rose Fox: My absolute favorite part of the job is publishing reviews that change the way people think about a book, and maybe even change their decision about whether to purchase that book. The best reviews for that are the thoughtful analyses that unpack what's going on between the covers and give you information that you just can't get from looking at a book's cover art or jacket blurbs, but there's also a lot to be said for the starred reviews of debut novels from complete unknowns, and the justified panning of much-anticipated books from big- name authors. When I get in a review like that and help it get out into the world, I know I'm really doing my work well--making my sections of the magazine worth the price of admission, giving our readers useful information they won't find anywhere else--and I love it.

Amazon.com: How often do you hear back from readers of PW, and what kinds of things do they say?

Rose Fox: I get very few emails from readers, and almost all are corrections. I did get a fan letter once, from a high school student who--I am almost too shy to admit this--wanted to know how she could be like me when she grew up. It was tremendously flattering! Of course I sent back a letter full of advice and encouragement. We exchanged a couple of emails after that, but I haven't heard from her in a while. I hope she's doing well.

August 26, 2010

Mr. Popper's March of the Penguins:Mr. Popper's Penguins, Richard and Florence Atwater's delightfully funny chapter book (originally published in 1938), is set to be turned into a movie starring Jim Carrey. [The Hollywood Reporter]

A Forest of Books: In Quebec, book lovers and nature lovers alike can enjoy The Jardin de la Connaissance, "a temporary garden in a forested area involving approximately 40,000 books, multi-coloured wooden plates and several varieties of mushrooms." [via GalleyCat]

"Through all of this, Lin's writing, despite its shortcomings, has perfectly captured the aimless malaise of the Internet generation. It's no wonder, then, that he has successfully used the Web to manage his career and push his name onto computer screens everywhere. His guerrilla-style online marketing has made him a Web phenomenon. But can it break him into the publishing mainstream?"

Moving and Shaking:Worth Dying For, the followup to the cliffhanger ending of 61 Hours, earns a spot on our Movers & Shakers list this morning as Lee Child fans anticipate its October release.

August 25, 2010

Every year now for the past three years I've gone to Wofford College in South Carolina in the summer to help run Shared Worlds, a teen writing camp for students interested in science fiction and fantasy. The camp is fairly unique, in that the first week the students split off into groups of ten and build their own SF or fantasy world. This years' worlds were incredibly complex, including mind-blowing creations like living islands and space squid. During this time, they're also getting discussion of biology, politics, and other relevant subjects from Wofford faculty. In the second week, they write short stories in their worlds, which are then constructively critiqued by professional writers.

Throughout the process, guest writers come in to lead discussions, do readings, and talk to the students. This summer, guests included short story writer Nathan Ballingrud, Holly Black and Kathe Koja, with Michael Bishop, Marly Youmans, and Will Hindmarch conducting the critiques and making themselves available in the writing labs. Camp director Jeremy Jones and I provide content in the form of lectures, and also help camp coordinator Timothy Schmidt keep things on track.RAs and TAs assist by giving the students structure and activities outside of class and writing time. Publishers like Wizards of the Coast provide scholarship money, while websites like SF Signal ran special MindMeld interviews to provide additional advice. Due to its unique approach, the camp has received coverage from the Guardian online, the Washington Post blog, and many others.

This summer we had almost 40 students, the most ever. They worked hard, had a lot of fun, and came out the other side invigorated and energized. The camp validates their love of fiction and of writing, and it allows them to concentrate on being creative for two weeks without any other distractions. We had 15 returning students, some of whom were coming back for a third year. We love that kind of loyalty, especially since it keeps us on our toes to keep fine-tuning and honing the program.

This year, I had to leave after the first week, so I left a proxy: a green plastic alien baby who, as a kind of jump-start to my website many years ago, I sent to various writers and others around the world. This particular alien baby has been to the South Pole, to Thailand, to Finland, to Central Asia, and many other places---thus some of the photos in this post. The students really adopted the alien baby and took him (her?) to heart!

(Student Miranda Severance took several photos, including one of the baby's tanning session...)

(Why does Davis like zombies? "Because they never stop coming for you," he said. "And your life just gets harder and harder"¦")

As you might expect, this group was composed of amazing readers---the kinds of readers that make the purported death of reading seem far, far away. They're conversant and comfortable with new technology, but often prefer to curl up with an old-fashioned hardcopy book. (Indeed, publishers like Tor, Pyr, First Second, Small Beer Press, Firebird, HarperCollins, and others donate books to Shared Worlds, which are ravenously devoured by the students.)

(Is the alien baby going somewhere, or about to play D&D? Only Miranda Severance knows.)

Under the guidance of Will Hindmarch, and using as the writing prompt "found objects" I gave them on the first day--everything from an old medal to arcane parts from a garage door remote control---the students created content for a chapbook of their writing that served as a nice keepsake.

Several students were kind enough to provide their reading recommendations for Omnivoracious: